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Vervis

Vervis is a project hosting and management application, with a focus on software projects and decentralization. There is still a lot to do, but if you’d like to try it, a few things more or less work. See below for details.

Vervis is free software, and is committed to software freedom. Most of its code is in the public domain using the CC0 Public Domain Dedication. The application as a whole however is released under AGPL version 3. For the legal details, see the file COPYING. Please use and reuse Vervis for a Good purpose, and share your work too in the same spirit.

Try It

You can either use the existing instance mentioned below, or install your own instance (see INSTALL.md).

My focus has been on writing the backend side of features and exploring various experimental features. As a result, the user interface and visual design and page styles (i.e. the whole UX and UI) are in a bad shape right now, so I want to write a few little guidelines to help you find your way until this situation improves.

There is a Vervis instance running at https://dev.angeley.es, and I store my code on it. Feel free to use it and try it, however do please treat it as a demo, as it’s not a reliable stable instance for general use yet. If for any reason you do with to keep some code and tickets etc. on it for actual use, please contact me to let me know.

Here are the steps to make the most out of it at this point (at least at the time of writing, I’ll try to keep this little tutorial up to date)!

Create an SSH key if you don’t have one. Most likely you do, for pushing to your existing repos hosted on your favorite project hosting platform.

Browse to the instance I linked above, and click Sign up. Choose a username and a password. Email address is currently optional on this instance, but it’s going to be required soon and used for things like password reset, so please do provide a real email address.

Log in. Once you log in, the front page will change, and among other things, it will link to your SSH keys. Go there to add your SSH key. In the algorithm box you paste the first part e.g. ssh-rsa, and in the second box you paste the long scary part that follows it.

The front page also links you to repos and projects, you can create a project and open tickets. You can also create a Git or Darcs repo, and optionally associate it with a project. A project can have any number of repos asociated with it, sharing the same ticket tracker. Creating a project or repo may ask you to create a project or repo role; the front page has links for creating these

You can browse all the projects and repos hosted on the instance.

Add the following to your ~/.ssh/config file, or create it if doesn’t exist. To be honest I’m not sure it’s still required, and haven’t tested yet. If you find that this step is unnecessary and everything works without it, let me know :)

Host dev.angeley.es
ControlMaster no
ForwardAgent no
ForwardX11 no

Once you create a repository, it is possible that initially, trying to look at it will give you 404. It should be okay though once you push some commit into it.

The examples below use Darcs, but it’s exactly the same for Git. They are equally supported.

Cloning repositories works over (unauthenticated) HTTPS and (authenticated) SSH.

HTTPS clone:

$ darcs clone https://dev.angeley.es/s/fr33domlover/r/vervis

SSH clone and push:

If your system username and Vervis username are identical:

$ darcs clone dev.angeley.es:wistera

If the repo is under another user:

$ darcs clone dev.angeley.es:aviva/poems

If usernames are different:

$ darcs clone luke@dev.angeley.es:wistera

If the repo is under another user:

$ darcs clone luke@dev.angeley.es:aviva/poems

A few more little notes:

No password reset, it’s already implemented but not deployed yet at the time of writing these words

A few more features are available, such as ticket workflows and ticket claim requests, but they are less important so I’m not going into them at this point

Deletion of users, projects and repos may not work

Login session should last for 2 hours after last access

The instance I’m running serves only HTTPS, no plain HTTP

There’s no HTTPS push

Merge requests not implemented yet

I started working on federation using ActivityPub, I’ll update here when it’s ready for trying against ActivityPub clients and servers

Feedback is very very very very very welcome and needed!!! :)

Features

This is a list of initial features I plan to support in Vervis. It helps me get an overview of more-or-less what’s left to do before the first release. It hasn’t been updated in a long time, actually, but soon I’ll get to it.

Reliability requirements

These features are considered critical for a Vervis instance to be a reasonably reliable place where people can host their projects and repos, and not worry about some bug or missing feature causing loss of data or access.

See the file INSTALL.md for a detailed usage and deployment guide. The file ChangeLog explains how to see the history log of the changes done in the code. NEWS.md provides a friendly overview of the changes for each release.

Reporting Bugs and Suggesting Features

If you found a bug, or you have an idea, a feature request or a wishlist item, open a ticket for it! Even if you’re going to implement something or try to solve it.

If you’re going to implement some feature or fix some bug you found, start by opening a ticket so that other people will know which features are being developed and who does what.